Grading And Student Expectations

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bandarqqOn February 17 the New York Times published an article titled “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes.” I posted a link to the article on my wall in facebook, and received more comments to that posting than I have ever received to any of my blog posts! The article claims that students today have a strong sense of entitlement that causes disputes over grades when the students receive marks lower than what they feel they deserve. A secondary point is that students expect relatively high grades, B’s to be exact, merely for showing up to class and completing the assignments. In general, the people who commented on my posting were other teachers who wanted to share horror stories of students (and parents) with entitlement issues.

I’m sure those of us who teach can all rattle off a few such stories. I had a young man in class at UConn a few semesters ago who would get angry with me when he received anything less than an A on a paper, and at one point informed me that I was going to keep him out of medical school. Mind you, I made him work hard to revise his papers, but ultimately he received a B in the course. Another time a young woman who skipped twenty-one of twenty-eight class meetings stormed out of my office screaming that I had ruined her life when she failed my class.

My worst case occurred several years ago in a high school Advanced Placement class. For the last assignment of the third quarter, two students turned in the exact same essay. I googled it and found it quickly. Both students received zeros for the assignment. For one student, this zero dropped his quarter average to a D-. The other student wound up with an F, which prevented her from participating in athletics that spring. To make a long story short, her parents begged, pleaded, argued, even got other adults from the community to try to offer services to the school in exchange for a grade change. I didn’t budge and my administration left the decision in my hands. Part of the parents’ argument was that grading was subjective, and even with the zero on the plagiarized paper there was no reason I couldn’t reconsider an earlier paper and change a minus grade to a solid letter grade, which would have been enough to pass her for the quarter. My argument was that it was the last paper of the quarter, and if I were going to engage in any grade massaging I’d be more inclined to alter the other student’s grade so that he failed, too.

I felt bad for both students. I liked them both, but I had no qualms about serious consequences for plagiarism. In fact, I think the school could have done more, like expel them from the National Honors Society. But that’s another subject. However, these situations bring up another issue for me, and that is the complicated issue of grading, which I think shares blame with student entitlement.

How many of us have spent a weekend or more slaving over student essays, writing thoughtful and helpful comments, even extensive letters at the end of each paper that address in detail the strengths and weaknesses of the work, only to return the papers and watch the students turn to the last page, look at the letter grade, and then toss the paper in the waste basket? It happens time and again. Or we return papers and every kid who got a plus or a minus grade turns in a so-called revision which has nothing more than corrections of surface errors, and expects to have that B- magically become a B or that C+ magically become a B-. This sort of behavior from students is maddening and common.

What would happen if we didn’t give letter or number grades?

Three years ago, my third year teaching Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers, I refused to give grades on the papers. I told the students that my experience teaching the prospective teachers told me that they were all good writers and would likely end the semester with good grades. In fact, I had never given below a B in the course during the previous two years. (By contrast, in my American Literature sections I rarely found myself giving A’s and often gave out C’s or lower). I informed them that if the quality of anyone’s work seemed inferior, I would speak with them. Otherwise, papers would only be receiving narrative comments and revisions were expected. The reaction? You’d think I had just taken away the heroin supply of a roomful of junkies. Students with 4.0 GPAs writing beautiful papers for the course would approach me after class, in the hall or in my office, and in hushed tones ask, “Please, can you tell me my grade? Just give me a hint? Is it below an A? Please? You have to tell me!” I’d say that I hadn’t recorded a grade, but if they’d like we could look at the latest draft of the most recent paper and talk about what they might consider doing to improve. They’d say, “Improve?! Oh my God, I don’t have an A, do I?!”

My point is that grades become a narcotic, and in the end don’t tell the student or the teacher much about the quality of thought or writing exhibited in the work. I have to wonder how many of the arguments mentioned in the Times article could have been avoided if there were no grades but only narrative feedback. It’s not a completely alien idea. Yesterday the Norwich Bulletin published a piece on an alternative high school in Lisbon that uses only narrative evaluations. Perhaps I am being unrealistic in my idealism, but I’d like to scrap the current grading system and replace it with narrative evaluation. Of course then we teachers would have to do a lot more writing. It’s interesting to consider how much resistance that would produce.

How Meritorious Are You?

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judi ceme onlineThe other day I was exchanging emails with my friend Jon, who like me was a high school English teacher for more than a decade before making a move to higher education. Both of us have school-age children and spouses in education. We were cynically commenting on President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Duncan’s Race to the Top program, which was announced this past July. According to its website (http://www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop/index.html), Race to the Top “provides competitive grants to encourage and reward States that are creating the conditions for education innovation and reform; implementing ambitious plans in the four education reform areas described in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA); and achieving significant improvement in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates, and ensuring that students are prepared for success in college and careers.” Jon made the observation that the phrase “Race to the Top” “conjure[s] images of students scrambling up ladders, stepping on fingers, a few triumphantly cheering from the precarious high perch, others clinging for dear life midway, and many, many more having fallen off completely.” I suggested that we hold a competition for a renaming of the act. My suggestions were Mission Impossible; Operation Assessment Overload; Waiting for Merit; The Few, the Proud, the Adequate Yearly Progress; or Testing: Yes We Can! Jon suggested that I spend too much time thinking about these things, which is probably true.

The problem, of course, isn’t that the federal government is trying to improve public education nor is it the five billion dollars in available grant funds. It’s the strings that the government is attaching to those funds. Yesterday’s Hartford Courant ran an article by Grace Merrit that discusses the State Board of Education’s first meeting to begin grappling with Connecticut’s application for funds from the Race competition. Merrit’s article points out that “To be eligible for [funds], applicants must prove that performance assessments for teachers and school administrators are linked to student and school performance.” This will have to entail the evaluation of teachers, and this will most likely result in some form of merit pay for teachers tied directly to student performance, and we all know that such performance will be measured not by grades but by standardized test scores. The short-hand version is that, for schools to get federal funds, teachers will have to raise CAPT and CMT scores. Or, to paraphrase State Board Vice Chairwoman Janet Finneran, we will have to sell our souls and abandon our teaching philosophies.

I can’t help but think about merit at UConn. I know I have written about this before, and it’s dull to go into detail, but suffice to say that it is one of the most contentious subjects at our department meetings. Professors end up quibbling about whether or not administrative work (like running a writing program!) is equivalent to the publication of scholarship. They quibble over the relative merits of a poem compared to a scholarly essay. There is concern that the process is too subjective. And really, the money is paltry, maybe a few hundred dollars. It’s not that. It’s that people work hard and they get upset when a committee of their peers gives them a modest merit rating. It’s like the tale of the boy who writes an essay on his grandmother and gets a C+. He walks away not so much upset about the grade as he is upset about the fact that you just told him he has a C+ grandmother.

Well, the good news about this (and I am being completely sarcastic here) is that if you teach in the suburbs you’ll dodge the bullet, at least this time around. Your district won’t be getting any of that Race to the Top money the state receives and you won’t have to deal with teacher evaluations, either. The state is targeting twenty urban school districts for these funds (and the necessary teacher assessment component). They are Hartford, East Hartford, Manchester, Bloomfield, New Britain, Bristol, Middletown, Meriden, Ansonia, Bridgeport, Danbury, Hamden, Naugatuck, New Haven, New London, Norwalk, Stamford, Waterbury, West Haven, Windham, and the Technical High School System. As I write the names of these towns I picture teachers I know from each district and their various reactions of fear, anger, disbelief, and resignation.

As I was processing my own emotional responses to this, I was thinking about how hard if not impossible it is to devise a fair and accurate assessment system for teachers. And I was thinking about another article I had read in the Courant a couple weeks before, by James Starr and Mayra Esquilin. They were writing about how successful Hartford’s schools have been in the wake of reorganization and reform efforts throughout the district. Starr and Esquilin point out that CMT scores have climbed by 25% since 2007, and graduation rates are up to 42%. (They don’t say it in the article, but graduation rates were below 30% just a few years ago). This is wonderful and encouraging news. But just two days later a letter to the editor ran that lambasted Hartford teachers and administrators for graduating only 42% of their students. Can you imagine the public outcry if those teachers and administrators received merit pay when only 42% of Hartford’s students were graduating? Conversely, can you imagine the discouragement and anger among teachers if after achieving such improvement they received no merit recognition?

It’s simply a Catch-22. And really, as much as we’d all like to be paid better, I suspect it wouldn’t really be about the money for the teachers. Honestly, once those federal funds trickled their way down to the teachers they’d never get much anyway. It’s about being recognized for our hard work. Most of us, I suspect, would be damn happy with a letter from our administration praising our good work, or a prominent article in the Courant or elsewhere reporting positively on our meritorious efforts.